Dolphins speak

On 19/12/2007, news has it that Australian scientist Dr Liz Hawkins and her team has unraveled the meaning of squeaks and whistles that make up dolphin speech. They observed bottlenose dolphins for three years and from the starting frequency of the sound, its duration and its end frequency, she identified 186 different whistle types, of which 20 were particularly common, that dolphins make to communicate in a complex and contextual manner.

The scientists have recorded 1,647 different whistles. These were grouped into 5 tonal classes which are related to certain behaviors. In a sense, that makes these sounds a language.

To think of only human beings are capable of having language is, to me, beyond the intension of anthropocentricity and over limiting the definition of language. After all, the Oxford English Dictionary does allow for the inarticulate sounds used by the lower animals, birds, etc as part of the definition of language. In the same dictionary, the generalized definition of language is "words and the methods of combining them for the expression of thought”. Based on this definition, as long as we accept that some animals have thoughts and words can be any definite audio or visual or other tangible symbols of any kind, then it is plausible to think of dolphins having a language as long as they can use it to communicate their thoughts. Dr Hawkins has just discovered that and I won’t blame her for claiming she has unraveled dolphin speech.

I tend to entertain the belief that many common animals we encounter like dogs, cats and birds have their language. Even bees and ants too have their language of sort. They communicate among themselves though we do not understand them. I would venture to say that if we pay enough attention to them, we can understand their language. Dr Hawkins has just done that with the dolphins.

What Dr Hawkins did with dolphins others can do with dogs or birds and learn a dog’s language or birds’ language. I would venture to say that someone somewhere might have already done that.

Can the same principle be applied beyond animals or living things? Science presupposes definite patterns that make prediction possible. If we care to observe, to attend, to meditate, we see patterns everywhere. Every pattern is, in a sense, a language. Attending to or meditating on these patterns enables us to learn that language. Learning a part of that language enables us to better observe the patterns and by iteration, we can learn more of that language. We, in short, thereby gain knowledge and know the world better.

In 1993, my Master has performed something extra ordinary in our presence by blindfolding himself and told what was written by a subject. When asked, he told us it was from the pattern of the subject’s breath that he could tell what was in the subject’s mind. In this case, though blindfolded, he was able to perceive someone’s breath in great details to decipher the breath patterns and deduce his thoughts which I presume have influenced the subject’s breath patterns. Isn’t the subject’s breath patterns a language to be learned?

Our problem is we do not attend sufficiently. We are careless. We take things for granted. We are distracted. We look but we do not see. We hear but we do not listen. We let knowledge slip by our senses or mind.


By Hiew Jan 2008